injury which our institutions
may receive. On the contrary, no care that can be used in the
construction of our Government, no division of powers, no distribution
of checks in its several departments, will prove effectual to keep us a
free people if this spirit is suffered to decay; and decay it will
without constant nurture. To the neglect of this duty the best
historians agree in attributing the ruin of all the republics with whose
existence and fall their writings have made us acquainted. The same
causes will ever produce the same effects, and as long as the love of
power is a dominant passion of the human bosom, and as long as the
understandings of men can be warped and their affections changed by
operations upon their passions and prejudices, so long will the
liberties of a people depend on their own constant attention to its
preservation. The danger to all well-established free governments arises
from the unwillingness of the people to believe in its existence or from
the influence of designing men diverting their attention from the
quarter whence it approaches to a source from which it can never come.
This is the old trick of those who would usurp the government of their
country. In the name of democracy they speak, warning the people against
the influence of wealth and the danger of aristocracy. History, ancient
and modern, is full of such examples. Caesar became the master of the
Roman people and the senate under the pretense of supporting the
democratic claims of the former against the aristocracy of the latter;
Cromwell, in the character of protector of the liberties of the people,
became the dictator of England, and Bolivar possessed himself of
unlimited power with the title of his country's liberator. There is, on
the contrary, no instance on record of an extensive and well-established
republic being changed into an aristocracy. The tendencies of all such
governments in their decline is to monarchy, and the antagonist
principle to liberty there is the spirit of faction--a spirit which
assumes the character and in times of great excitement imposes itself
upon the people as the genuine spirit of freedom, and, like the false
Christs whose coming was foretold by the Savior, seeks to, and were it
possible would, impose upon the true and most faithful disciples of
liberty. It is in periods like this that it behooves the people to be
most watchful of those to whom they have intrusted power. And although
there is a